The present invention relates generally to optical polarizers, and more particularly to a flat optical polarizing beam splitter which operates to pass a single linear polarization component of an input light beam.
Polarizers are common optical elements used generally either to separate or split two polarization states or to filter out one such state from an input beam. Many applications require such polarizers to be as flat as possible and require placement normal to the input beam to accommodate space limitations. Unfortunately, current flat polarizers placed normal to the input beam operate by absorbing the undesired polarization state. Such absorption not only prohibits alternate uses of the removed state, it also produces significant heat which restricts the performance of many high energy applications.
It is well known that two specially coated right-angle prisms, cemented along their hypotenuses, can be used to split an input beam of light into its two orthogonal linear polarization states. While such polarizing beam-splitting cubes do not suffer from the absorption of flat polarizers, they are inherently bulky and therefore occupy a large amount of beam path and add undesirable mass to the application.